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BELIEF IN RE-BIRTH.
Tennyson and Whitman, Herodotus.
“The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.” In the 'Two Voices' muses Tennyson
"Or if through lower lives I came Tho' all experience past became, Consolidate in mind and frameI might forget my weaker lot ; For is not our first year forgot? The haunts of memory echo not.”
Walt Whitman confirms in his 'Leaves of Grass',"As to you, Life, I reckon you are the leavings of
many deaths, No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times
. before.” Such and similar other passages might be culled in numbers to show how the doctrine of metempsychoses influenced the best of the European minds in the domain of
Poetry.
Again, Egyptian culture and polity was in and through saturated with the idea of metempsychoses. “The Egyptians propounded,” says Herodotus, "the theory that the human soul is imperishable and that where the body of any one dies, it enters
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